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2 The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. 1 What attracted me from economics to sociology back in the 1960s was not an interest in this or that empirical area of study, but sociology’s promise as the study of the human condition in general. Sociology departments in those days typically included not just sociologists per se, but also anthropologists and social psychologists, and not infrequently staff whose original training had been in history or another discipline among the humanities and social sciences. More to the present point, a generation ago a whole range of sociological theorists – from Talcott Parsons to Norbert Elias, even though those two were poles apart on almost everything else – took it for granted that a central concern of sociology was to understand the connection between ‘social structure’ and ‘personality’, both in the modern world and in the past. Several years before I accidentally encountered Elias (and while I was still studying with Parsons), I took my own inspiration from David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and, especially, from C. Wright Mills’s famous statement that ‘the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’. 2 In order to do that, and in order (at least in part) to remedy the intellectual fragmentation of contemporary sociology, I contend that we need to make an historical social psychology central to our intellectual enterprise. You will not be surprised to learn that in my opinion Norbert Elias made an outstanding contribution to formulating such an historical social psychology. But I also think that his contribution is still only partly understood. Let us start in familiar territory. The concept of social habitus, which had been widely used in German sociology in the 1920s, was central to his thinking. Yet, for all its popularity since it was reintroduced by Pierre Bourdieu, the concept still has the capacity to frighten many sociologists. They are alarmed at any attempt to describe psychological or personality differences between groups of human beings – differences, more specifically, of habitus. The symbolic interactionist tradition, from Herbert Blumer to Randall Collins, rejects it outright. Along with their ethnomethodological offshoot, symbolic interactionists want to explain human behaviour as situationally generated, with no concern for the longer-term historical 1 William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’. 2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 6.
3 and cultural shaping of continuities of behaviour within particular social groups. Tony Giddens, that great voice of the sociological Zeitgeist and political correctness (at least until Libya), has argued that because all normal human beings can speak a language, there are no significant psychological differences between peoples. 3 In response to such simplistic thinking, I often quote a remark by Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray, way back in 1948: Every person is in certain respects (a) like all other people (b) like some other people (c) like no other person 4 The study of habitus formation unfolds at level (b). It can focus on differences in habitus at a certain point in time – on the model of Bourdieu’s study of class differences in habitus in Distinction – or it can be more concerned with changes in how habitus is formed over time, which was Elias’s principal focus. But, as Elias emphasised more than Bourdieu, habitus formation is not a simple one-way process. As he shows at some length in The Society of Individuals, every process of socialisation – through which the social standards of behaviour and feeling that prevail at a given time are transmitted to individuals – is also simultaneously a process of individualisation, in which individual people make their own subtle adaptations of those standards. Socialisation and individualisation are two sides of the same coin. Let us now be more specific. One of the most important elements in Elias’s thinking – which he must have taken over in part from Freud – was the close connection between the prevalent dangers and the prevalent fears in particular social groups. This connection plays a major part in his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences, but there is no time to go into that today. 5 It is also central to his magnum opus and best known work, On the Process 3 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), p. 241: ‘There simply is not discernible correlation between linguistic complexity and the level of material “advancement” of different societies. This fact in itself would indicate that there is [sic] unlikely to be any general differences of psychic organisation between oral cultures and “civilisations” on the other.’ 4 Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray (eds), Personality in Nature, Society and Culture (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948), p. 35. 5 See in particular Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8]) and Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 14]).
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